One Man's Trash

BUENOS AIRES, ARGENTINA -- In a warehouse in the poor Buenos Aires municipality of Lomas de Zamora, heaps of garbage reach to the ceiling and spill out the doors. It is a sight -- and smell -- that would make some cringe, but to garbage pickers across the city who dream of duplicating this experiment in self-organization, the refuse-filled warehouse is a sign of hope.

Since 1989, Pepe Córdoba has been a ciruja, or garbage picker -- someone who rummages through curbside trash in search of recyclable materials that can be sold. Córdoba directs a garbage-pickers cooperative that recently rented the warehouse to store and sort the garbage its members collect. His cooperative has become a model for others.

In the past year, because of the economic crisis that has devastated Argentina, garbage pickers have become omnipresent. Estimates of the number of Buenos Aires garbage scavengers range from 40,000 to 120,000.

Six of seven cirujas live in the industrial suburbs that ring the city of Buenos Aires and contain the city's landfills. Each day, a recent study estimated, suburban scavengers working in the city collect 66 tons of waste cardboard and paper products -- trash that is recycled instead of added to the landfills in the suburbs. The economic benefits are considerable: In 2001, Argentina imported $100 million worth of cardboard from Brazil; in 2002, in part because of the garbage pickers, Argentina exported recycled cardboard.

Nonetheless, most cirujas in Argentina earn only between 80 cents and $4 a day, working informally without health insurance or other labor protections. Hoping to raise their incomes and gain access to the mainstream economy's benefits, garbage pickers are increasingly forming organizations they hope will replace intermediaries. At the same time, garbage picking has achieved greater acceptance as a legitimate -- and now legal -- survival strategy.

Garbage picking is not unique to Argentina. Worldwide, when economic crises have hit, the newly impoverished have turned to scavenging: in America, during the Great Depression; in Haiti, during a 1990s trade embargo; and in Grozny, Russia, today, where Chechen rebellion and Russian repression have racked the local economy.

Even during economic upswings, trash scavenging is a regular refuge for the desperate throughout the developing world. In Cairo, Egypt, zabbaleen use donkey-drawn carts to collect garbage. In Manila, Philippines, boyte dyario purchase recyclable trash from residents.

Garbage picking in Argentina -- which began in the late 19th century -- makes use of almost all the modes of scavenging found worldwide. Some Argentine scavengers walk with shopping carts or custom-built carts; others ride tricycles, pay to ride on trucks or work for those who own the trucks. Still others use horse-drawn carts. Some garbage pickers have "clients" who regularly provide them with waste, but most simply collect what they find on the curb. Garbage pickers' children accompany their parents, providing extra hands and helping to draw sympathy from potential clients. Children too young to walk the long distances of a garbage-picking route frequently ride in the carts, with the trash.

Whatever their method, garbage scavengers here in Argentina and elsewhere face considerable difficulties: parasitic and other infectious diseases, the possibility of being hit by cars and trucks, crime and police repression and political operatives and garbage mafias that control collection in desirable areas. According to sociologist Héctor Castillo Berthier, garbage pickers in Mexico City have a life expectancy of only 35 years -- about half that of Mexico City residents in general. One of every three children born to Egyptian zabbaleen dies before reaching one year of age, according to a separate study. So groups of garbage pickers seeking to collectively improve their lot -- such as the one formed by Pepe Córdoba -- confront significant challenges, to say the least.

Getting to Córdoba's warehouse from the city of Buenos Aires is not simple. From downtown, the area richest in refuse, I rode a bus for 30 minutes before boarding a train to Lomas de Zamora. At the train station -- where anti-American and anti-Semitic graffiti littered the walls -- a woman offered, "Remember to ride in the middle cars of the train, not in the front or the back. You're less likely to be mugged." The train was crowded -- not just with passengers but itinerant sellers screaming out pitches for caramels (30 for a peso), garlic cloves, mints, greeting cards, children's stickers, "Chinese" horoscopes and a laser said to detect false currency ("more and more necessary everyday"). From the train station to the warehouse, I walked about a mile. Unlike many of the garbage pickers who make this trek, I was not toting 200 pounds of trash.

Córdoba's warehouse sits between a field of propylene glycol tanks and the shantytown where he lives. Burlap bags fat with trash and stacked 15 feet high flank the entrance. Inside, there is a scale on the left and a blackboard listing prices on the right. The scale is key, because intermediaries often rig theirs to cheat the cirujas. "The difference between us and the deposits is that here, a kilo is a kilo. In the deposits, 10 kilos are 6 kilos, 7 kilos," Córdoba says.

Most garbage pickers work in groups no larger than their families. Lacking a place to classify garbage, many sort the trash they collect in their homes. And always in immediate need of income, they sell their merchandise nightly or weekly, without accumulating large volumes. The result is that intermediaries pay garbage pickers much less than the intermediaries receive from recycling companies. Córdoba intends to eliminate all these problems, at least for the garbage pickers under his warehouse's roof.

The cooperative has purchased an old pickup truck, ordered uniforms for its 500 garbage pickers and successfully lobbied for a change in municipal trash-collection policies. Córdoba also created a women's group that works in the warehouse, mending clothes and processing trash.

Cooperatives such as Córdoba's have helped soften public and political attitudes toward cirujas. The left here has long pointed to the garbage pickers as proof that the poor are honest, hardworking people without opportunities. The right, once aggressively critical of garbage pickers as potential thieves who sully sidewalks, now sees them as the model poor -- masses who dutifully follow the invisible hand, even when it points to trash.

In turn, the public's attitude toward garbage pickers has changed from rejection to sympathy. Garbage pickers now solicit feelings of solidarity from 65 percent of Argentines, according to Hugo Haime and Associates, a polling organization. Only 6 percent say they fear garbage pickers.

That shift in public opinion has resulted in an increased sorting of garbage -- which saves cirujas the unsanitary labor of sifting through trash bags -- and a proliferation of improvised soup kitchens and vaccination programs for garbage pickers, which have been set up across Buenos Aires by neighborhood associations and church groups.

And this December, the city legislature revoked an ordinance set by the last military dictatorship that had made garbage picking illegal. The ordinance had created a climate in which police often confiscated the carts of garbage pickers -- or worse.

Juan Vallejo, who has spent eight of his 18 years working as a garbage picker, was sifting through curbside trash bags when a police officer attacked him, he says, punching and kicking him.

"He beat me to get information out of me that I didn't have, to see if I was a thief," Vallejo recalls.

The incident prompted Vallejo to join a garbage-picking cooperative called El Ceibo, for which he works for four hours on weekday afternoons in return for a monthly subsidy from the government. At the cooperative, he has had no problems with police, in part because El Ceibo garbage scavengers wear name tags and jerseys. He no longer has to rummage through trash bags because the cooperative collects only materials that have already been separated by those who throw them out. And instead of full-time garbage picking, he can wash windows for pay in the morning and study construction at a trade school at night. "That way I can get a dignified job and not have to be a garbage picker for the rest of my life," Vallejo says.

Outside Argentina, a few garbage-picking cooperatives have successfully reduced the problems affecting their members. In Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, a cooperative increased garbage-picker incomes tenfold after it replaced intermediaries, according to a study by Héctor Castillo. The cooperative's members also gained a school for their children and better medical care.

But the Argentine cooperatives, despite their obvious benefits, are far from replicating that success. None except Córdoba's group seems to have a warehouse, and most, including Córdoba's, are not really cooperatives. Instead of distributing or jointly owning the group's earnings, Córdoba and several others receive a monthly salary while the cooperative pays the garbage pickers by the kilo, like any other intermediary.

"One of the risks with Pepe Córdoba is that the garbage pickers are not full members of the cooperative, and that the cooperative would just come to play a role of classification and intermediation," says Gabriel Fajn, a University of Buenos Aires sociologist who advises garbage-picking cooperatives.

At worst, Córdoba's group is simply a growing business that is fair but not needlessly generous. But other cooperatives -- such as the White Train organization managed by Hector Aquino -- are more suspect.

The White Train brings garbage pickers from the outlying suburbs of Buenos Aires province to the federal capital once a day, and makes the return trip twice at night. The private company Trenes de Buenos Aires granted the garbage pickers this train, with the seats stripped out so that their carts would fit, after regular customers complained about the cirujas.

Aquino's organization is one of two groups whose members ride the train, on which each ciruja pays 10.5 pesos to ride for half a month. Aquino and his friends formed the cooperative in 1999 after losing construction jobs.

"My intention is to have a well-established cooperative with a soup kitchen for the kids. I don't want them to be in the street," Aquino says. "And with the soup kitchen, I want to give after-school help to all the kids, with a gym teacher, a music teacher, even a math teacher."

But his cooperative falls far short of his intention. All that is collectively owned by the members of his cooperative -- he claims there are 70 to 80 -- is a broken scale. "We need a warehouse, someone to give us a warehouse, someone to lend us a hand," Aquino says.

His organization -- searching for that someone -- may have simply become an example of clientelismo, or favors-for-votes corruption, dressed up as a cooperative. Aquino's home, a small, concrete shack with a trash-filled backyard, was loaned to him by "a compadre in the Radical Party," one of the country's two main political parties. The rent is free. The Radical Party crest is emblazoned on an exterior wall.

Fajn, though, remains optimistic about the garbage-picking cooperatives. "You have to analyze the formation of these cooperatives in terms of processes. Today, there are very few, I would say almost none, that could be considered a cooperative in ideal terms. But I think we have to watch their evolution in time. If one thinks back two years ago, they were nonexistent," he says.

A ride on the White Train shows how crucial it is that the garbage pickers form real cooperatives. The train is but a metal skeleton, without windows, doors or light fixtures. Even chunks of wall are missing. On a recent weekday, the 11 passengers in the first car were mostly under 20 years old. María Vega, 15, sat on a window ledge, her ponytail flopping in the wind. After she finished ninth grade two years ago, she became a garbage picker to support her family. She says she leaves her house around 5 p.m. and returns between 11 p.m. and 3 a.m.. What would she share with American readers besides her schedule? "Nothing else. I get off here," she says, and hops off the White Train through a window frame.